Search

When it comes to the relationship between social policy and penal policy, existing scholarship often focuses on the penal–welfare tradeoff, according to which countries with large and generous welfare states tend to have lower incarceration rates and less harsh treatment of offenders. We know much less about the relationship between the punitive turn in criminal justice and the use of discipline within social policy. Has there been a parallel trend of law-and-order policies and stricter benefit conditionality, a kind of 'criminalization' of welfare beneficiaries, as critical scholarship suggests? We test this idea for the first time with quantitative data, using public spending on public order and safety and unemployment benefit conditionality data for 18 rich democracies between 1990 and 2012, that is, the period when a punitive turn as well as the rise of activation and workfare is said to have taken place. Contrary to the critical literature, we do not find evidence of parallel trends toward more discipline in both areas, but rather a negative relationship of 'communicating vessels', where a greater use of disciplinary tools in social policy is associated with stagnating or even shrinking spending on police and prisons. Moreover, this pattern tends to emerge under conditions of higher welfare state generosity. These findings have important implications about the role of state 'discipline' in contemporary policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question to what extent voters punish governments for cutting the welfare state is an unsettled issue in social policy research. Our contribution addresses this shortcoming by systematically analyzing how media reporting about legislative changes to the welfare state affects the public agenda and citizens' vote intentions while controlling for the influence of actual cutbacks and expansions. In our analysis we examine the case of Germany from 1994 to 2014; a period where major cutbacks but also significant expansions to the German welfare state occurred. We find that mass media reporting about pension cutbacks is associated with a drop in government approval, whereas the reaction to expansive legislative changes is muted. We also find that the relationship of media reporting and government approval strongly depends on who is in government with the social democrats being punished harder than the Christian democrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on how much citizens value different features of public sector algorithms, specifically whether they prioritize effectiveness over transparency and stakeholder involvement in algorithm design or instead see effectiveness as less important. It does so with choice-based conjoint designs that present variants of algorithms used in policing and health care to respondents from representative German samples. Two studies with overall more than 3000 participants show that people are ready to trade away transparency and stakeholder involvement for small effectiveness gains. Citizens thus seem unlikely to demand accountable algorithms even in sensitive areas like policing and health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the federalism reform in 2006, the German Länder gained the competence to deviate from the nationwide standard legislation in various areas. In this study, we focus on nature conservation policies and see that some Länder are raising their regulative standards while others are lowering them. Based on an original dataset that measures this direction of policy change, our empirical analysis shows that the party-political composition of the state governments, and particularly the presence/absence of Green parties, plays a crucial role in explaining the variation. Moreover, we find that the strength of nature conservation associations and geographical conditions are relevant, too. In sum, our findings contribute to the growing literature on both the policy effects of the German federalism reform and the partisan effects on public policies, as well as the question of responsive decision-making in multilevel settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The question of why members of parliament (MPs) overwhelmingly toe the party line is receiving increasing scholarly attention. Adding to discipline‐based approaches, party loyalty, that is, a feeling of allegiance not related to policy agreement or disciplinary pressures, is an important part of the explanation. In this article, we employ a more nuanced view on party loyalty than previous observational studies and conceptualize it as the result of socialization processes of most politicians into the structures of their party prior to their mandate. We test our argument quantitatively using data for whipped votes in the German Bundestag (1949–2017). The results support our propositions that MPs who didn't hold party offices prior to their mandate have a higher probability of vote defection and that the behavioral differences related to pre‐parliamentary socialization vanish the longer MPs serve in parliament. Our work has important implications for research on intraparty politics, legislative behavior, and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]